Where Hope Resides in Washington

Seen around Washington, D.C., this summer: T-shirts of Shepard Fairey’s Barack Obama “Hope” poster with the rookie Redskins quarterback Robert Griffin III’s face in place of the President’s. In football terms, Griffin—better known as RGIII—faces as daunting a task in resurrecting the fortunes of the woebegone Redskins as the President does in reviving the U.S economy. The franchise, which owns three Super Bowl titles and is celebrating its eightieth anniversary this year, has not had a winning season since 2007. Their last playoff victory was in 2005. And, despite the entirely justified excitement over Washington’s season-opening upset of the New Orleans Saints yesterday, it will likely take the better part of a Presidential term before Griffin and the Redskins’ head coach, Mike Shanahan, can make the team into the postseason regulars they were during the administrations of George Allen and Joe Gibbs. Even Cam Newton’s benchmark first season last year resulted in only six victories for the Carolina Panthers.

The real hope for D.C. sports fans this year can be found not in Raljon, Maryland, where the Redskins play, but on the banks of the Anacostia River, home to the Washington Nationals. The Nationals have the best record in baseball and have been in first place in the National League East for almost the entire season. Their closest divisional pursuers, the Atlanta Braves, are five and a half games behind them with twenty-two to play. “Magic numbers” are being discussed daily in the Washington media, and, for the first time in memory, the phrase does not refer to the federal budget.

The Nationals have also provided the national baseball audience with two season-long stories: the arrival of the nineteen-year-old phenom Bryce Harper, and the controversy over the team’s plans to limit their ace Stephen Strasburg’s innings as he recovers from Tommy John surgery. The attention given to those two players has obscured the remarkable seasons being turned in by others on the Nats’ roster, including pitcher Gio Gonzalez (18-7, 2.98 ERA), closer Tyler Clippard (thirty saves), and the young shortstop Ian Desmond, who has twenty-one home runs and a string of clutch hits. (Local fans are guilty of overlooking the rest of the team, too. Judging by the T-shirts and jerseys at Nationals Park, the team’s three most popular players are Strasburg, Harper, and Ovechkin.)

The Redskins’ local dominance over the Nationals was front-page news in the Washington Post this past weekend. The writer Steve Hendrix pointed out that even though the Nationals’ T.V. ratings are up, averaging about fifty-seven thousand households, they are still dwarfed by those of the Redskins, whose first preseason game of the year posted a mark of two hundred and fifteen thousand. A visit to Nationals Park on Friday night revealed some of the challenges that lie ahead for the team in reducing that deficit. The stadium, in a redeveloped section of southeast D.C., is surrounded by an impressive array of shiny new office buildings, but the renewal has not yet reached Half Street, the corridor that leads from the Metro to the ballpark. Restaurants and bars are promised, but for now, early-arriving fans get to eat and drink among a cluster of fenced-off shipping containers dubbed the Half Street Fairgrounds. The stadium itself is an airy, modern structure, with a brutalist cement façade that eschews the nostalgia of many of the recent ballparks—correctly, since, as Steve Coll wrote in April, the history of baseball in Washington leaves little to be nostalgic about. Meanwhile, the city and team are still at an impasse over who will pay to keep the Metro running after midnight if playoff games go into extra innings or are delayed by rain.

Though it was a clear, warm weekend evening, with the team on a five-game winning streak and Strasburg making what was believed to be his final home start of the season, only twenty-eight thousand people showed up. The young pitcher proved ineffective and was pulled from the game after three innings. (Later, the team announced that he would not pitch again this year.) With the visiting Marlins up by a score of 6-2 in the fourth, fans began to leave. It was barely nine o’clock, and those who departed missed out on a rousing rally by the Nationals that forced extra innings. (The Marlins won in ten.)

Perhaps the crowd would have been larger for a marquee opponent. On the same night, fifty miles north, the Baltimore Orioles sold out Camden Yards for a game against the New York Yankees. The day before, the Orioles, foreseen by no one as contenders this year, had, under the management of Buck Showalter, surged into a first-place tie with New York atop the American League East. Without the assistance of the Yankees, however, the Orioles have faced the same attendance challenges as the Nationals. The week before Labor Day, with Baltimore on a winning streak and the Central Division-leading White Sox in town, only ten thousand people showed up for a Thursday-afternoon game. While the Orioles have a much longer and far more storied history than the Nationals, they, like their baseball brethren to the south, are completely overshadowed by the local football team. The Ravens, who came within a dropped pass of going to the Super Bowl last year, turn the streets and suburbs of Charm City purple on game days.

But there is another connection between the resurgent Orioles and the newly flush Nationals. They both have a lingering tie to the strike-shortened 1994 season. In that year, when play was suspended on August 11th, the Montreal Expos and the New York Yankees had the best records in their respective leagues and appeared to be headed for a World Series showdown. The Expos, who had never won a pennant, could not recover from the work stoppage. When the strike was over, they began selling off their players. The diminished attendance that was the result ultimately ended with their relocation to Washington. The Yankees, meanwhile, who were managed in 1994 by Buck Showalter, returned to the playoffs in 1995, losing to the Seattle Mariners in a memorable five-game series. The loss cost Showalter his job. He went on to see the Yankees become World Champions without him. (Showalter later built winners in Arizona and Texas that went on to the World Series without him; one wonders if, after his accomplishments with the Orioles, he should not be put in charge of the economic recovery, too.)

As both Showalter and Expos fans will tell you, the opportunity to enjoy a winning baseball team can disappear quickly. Listen up, Washington: while you still can, get behind this Nationals team. Then, in November, after the parade, check in on RGIII. If yesterday’s performance is any indication, he’ll be doing just fine.

Illustration by Tom Bachtell.

Jon Michaud is a novelist and the head librarian at The Center for Fiction.